How to Decide When to Optimize Your Landing Page for SEO or Conversions

Measuring the performance of a landing page can sometimes be frustrating, especially if you pay attention to the wrong metrics in your analytics program. It goes without saying that a lack of information on how to improve your landing pages’ performance can seriously undermine your content marketing strategy.

Often, the metrics you should follow will change depending on the landing page—some will perform well in search engines results, while others rake in high conversions. Either way, both play an important role in your content marketing sales funnel.

In this post, we’ll walk you through setting the focus for each of your website’s landing pages. By the time we’re finished, you’ll be able to follow the right metics to improve performance over time. Are you ready to tighten up the effectiveness of your site? Let’s get started!

Key Takeaways

There are two primary types of business landing pages.

Failing to focus on one or the other can lead to self-sabotaging outcomes.

Conversion driven landing pages should focus on high conversion rates.

What is a Landing Page?

Google defines a landing page as “A web page which serves as the entry point for a website or a particular section of a website.” This counts for pages and posts on your website that you expect new visitors to find. Essentially, it is any public facing page on your website.

Effective landing pages put an emphasis on quality over quantity. They concentrate on accomplishing a single goal by removing all extraneous elements—so you should remove anything that distracts the reader from the goal of the page. As a result, you’ll incentivize the visitor to keep reading by crafting content that highlights the benefits relevant to them.

The call to action leads to another landing page (Learn More About XYZ, instead of Buy XYZ Right Now, forexample).

As we mentioned before, different landing page types call for different measurements of success. For SEO-focused landing pages, keep these goals in mind:

Reduce the page’s bounce rate. This goes down when people click through to the next page, which is exactly what your goal is.

Increase page engagement. If the reader spends a lot of time on your page, there’s a good chance they are consuming your content. This increases the likelihood that they’ll follow through on your call to action.

Conversion-Driven Landing Pages

The intention of a conversion page is to make a sale. In other words, the content is designed to get a qualified lead to buy or invest in something.

Before getting too deep into conversions, it’s a good idea to review the basics. When it comes to counting conversion rates, any investment counts as a sale. This includes money, a call, or personal information. If a user subscribes to your newsletter, it’s a newsletter conversion.

Here are the signs that you should optimize a page for conversions over SEO:

The content is intended for a highly targeted audience.

The content is written to help the reader make a final purchasing decision.

The reader is expected to make a purchasing decision on the page without viewing any other landing page.

Visitors to the page are ideally qualified leads.

The call to action leads to a purchase, or an action-driven page such as a shopping cart.

Don’t get distracted by the bounce rates of this page, so long as the conversions are improving.

Conclusion

Failing to define the purpose of your landing pages can leave you tracking the wrong analytics. Don’t let this mistake waste your valuable time and resources, as doing so leaves potential leads and sales on the table.

To avoid this problem, be sure to choose a primary purpose for each page and optimize it accordingly. Let’s recap:

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Solomon Thimothy is the Co-founder of Clickx. With clients internationally, Clickx helps businesses gain better visibility online by focusing on more exposure, more traffic and more leads. Follow him on twitter @sthimothy

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